This paper presents and defends Kant’s non-voluntarist conception of political obligations. I argue that civil society is not primarily a prudential requirement for justice; it is not merely a necessary evil or moral response to combat our corrupting nature or our tendency to act viciously, thoughtlessly or in a biased manner. Rather, civil society is constitutive of rightful relations because only in civil society can we interact in ways reconcilable with each person’s innate right to freedom. Civil society (...) is the means through which we can rightfully interact even on the ideal assumption that no one ever succumbs to immoral temptation. (shrink)

The belief that obese people ought to lose weight and keep it off is widespread, and has a profound negative impact on the lives of the obese. I argue in this paper that most obese people have no such obligation, even if obesity is bad, and caused by calorie input exceeding output. Obese people do not have an obligation to achieve long-term weight loss if this is impossible for them, is worse than the alternative, or requires such an enormous effort (...) in relation to what stands to be gained that this option is supererogatory rather than obligatory. It is highly plausible that most obese people fall into one of these three groups. Politicians may still have obligations to fight obesity, but they ought to do so through progressive politics rather than blaming and shaming. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is prudentially wise to defer to groups about how they are essentially constituted and defined. After a few words situating the paper in my greater research project (§1), I articulate the kind of deference I have in mind (§2). Then I offer two conditional arguments on why it is epistemically desirable to let other people tell you how they ought to be identified (§3). The first argument is that people are owed lexical sovereignty because denying (...) it is absurd; the second is that modest skeptics ought to agree with it on the basis of some relatively anodyne and plausible epistemic considerations. (shrink)

This paper has a two-fold goal. First, I defend the view that the prejudicial behaviour that results from implicit biases is best understood as a type of habitual action—as a harmful, yet deeply entrenched, passively acquired, socially relevant type of habit. Second, I explore how characterizing such implicitly biased behaviour as a habit aids our understanding of the responsibility we bear for it. As habits are ultimately susceptible of being controlled, agents ought to be held responsible for their implicit biased (...) actions. Yet, the blaming response should target agents only insofar as they have failed (while being able) to develop a particular kind of ability: the ability to spot the kind of situations that require the exercise of the relevant intellectual, moral, social, and prudential obligations. Being thus responsible, however, is consistent with the agent’s not being blameworthy. For the automaticity of the blamed agent’s implicitly biased behaviour makes it unintentional relative to intellectual, moral, social, and prudential values that she already cares about. (shrink)

In Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead, Frances Kamm seeks to make sense of people’s widely variant choices about which lives they would choose to continue living. She does this by defending the Prudential Prerogative, which, in analogy to the Moral Prerogative, holds that in a fairly wide range of conditions we are under no intrapersonal rational obligation to choose either to die or to live on. I argue against Kamm's case for the Prudential Prerogative in favor of Life (...) Holism, the view that you ought to live the life that would be best for you as an individual when each potential life is considered as a whole. I argue that the features of the Moral Prerogative that make it an attractive principle do not transfer to the Prudential Prerogative, and that Life Holism can better account for the perspectival and non-summative features of the normative phenomena Kamm wants to capture while retaining a tight connection between reasons and goodness. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I (...) propose a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties. (shrink)

The harms associated with wireless mobile devices (e.g. smartphones) are well documented. They have been linked to anxiety, depression, diminished attention span, sleep disturbance, and decreased relationship satisfaction. Perhaps what is most worrying from a moral perspective, however, is the effect these devices can have on our autonomy. In this article, we argue that there is an obligation to foster and safeguard autonomy in ourselves, and we suggest that wireless mobile devices pose a serious threat to our capacity to fulfill (...) this obligation. We defend the existence of an imperfect duty to be a ‘digital minimalist’. That is, we have a moral obligation to be intentional about how and to what extent we use these devices. The empirical findings already justify prudential reasons in favor of digital minimalism, but the moral duty is distinct from and independent of prudential considerations. (shrink)

Epistemic burdens – the nature and extent of our ignorance (that and how) with respect to various courses of action – serve to determine our incentive structures. Courses of action that seem to bear impossibly heavy epistemic burdens are typically not counted as options in an actor’s menu, while courses of action that seem to bear comparatively heavy epistemic burdens are systematically discounted in an actor’s menu relative to options that appear less epistemically burdensome. That ignorance serves to determine what (...) counts as an option means that epistemic considerations are logically prior to moral, prudential, and economic considerations: in order to have moral, prudential, or economic obligations, one must have options, and epistemic burdens serve to determine our options. One cannot have obligations without doing some epistemic work. We defend this claim on introspective grounds. We also consider how epistemic burdens distort surrogate decision-making. The unique epistemology of surrogate cases makes the priority of the epistemic readily apparent. We then argue that anyone who accepts a principle similar to ought implies can is committed to the logical priority of the epistemic. We also consider and reject several possible counterarguments. -/- . (shrink)

There has been a growing charge that perdurantism—with its bloated ontology of very person-like objects that coincide persons—implies the repugnant conclusion that we are morally obliged to be feckless. I argue that this charge critically overlooks the epistemic situation—what I call the ‘veil of ignorance’—that perdurantists find themselves in. Though the veil of ignorance still requires an alteration of our commonsense understanding of the demands on action, I argue for two conclusions. The first is that the alteration that is required (...) isn’t a moral one, but rather an alteration of prudential reasoning. Second, and more importantly, this alteration isn’t necessarily a repugnant one. In fact, given that it prudentially pushes one towards greater impartiality, it may be seen as a point in favor of perdurantism. (shrink)

The Significant Interest view entails that even if there were no medical reasons to have access to genetic knowledge, there would still be reason for prospective parents to use an identity-release donor as opposed to an anonymous donor. This view does not depend on either the idea that genetic knowledge is profoundly prudentially important or that donor-conceived people have a right to genetic knowledge. Rather, it turns on general claims about parents’ obligations to help promote their children’s well-being and (...) the connection between a person’s well-being and the satisfaction of what I call their “worthwhile significant subjective interests.” To put this view simply, the fact that a donor-conceived person—who knows she is donor-conceived—is likely to be very interested in acquiring genetic knowledge gives prospective parents a weighty reason to use an identity-release donor. This is because parents should promote their children’s well-being through the satisfaction of their children’s worthwhile significant interests. (shrink)

There has been a growing worry that perdurantism—and similarly ontologically abundant views—is morally untenable. For perdurantism posits that, coinciding with persons, are person-like objects, and giving them their moral due seems to require giving up prudentially driven self-sacrifice. One way to avoid this charge is to adopt consequentialism. But Mark Johnston has argued that the marriage of consequentialism and perdurantism is in moral trouble. For, depending on the nature of time, consequentialist perdurantists either are unable to do more than one (...) good act or they are morally obliged to adopt a repugnant form of ageism. I argue both that perdurantist consequentialism doesn’t have the latter implication, and that there’s at least one plausible form of consequentialism that perdurantists can adopt to avoid the former implication. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 132 - 148 A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool most worth (...) considering is the covert, long-term Fool. Then I advance and critically assess two psychological arguments according to which the Fool’s policy of self-interested covenant breaking is prudentially irrational. The first argument holds that, taken together, the deep guilt from early-stage covenant breaking, the cumulative guilt from continued covenant breaking, and the high statistical risk of detection during high-volume covenant breaking render the Fool’s policy irrational. The second argument holds that the Fool’s policy is irrational because it puts him at risk of adopting a psychologically intolerable view of his fellow covenanters and, specifically, the extent to which they can be trusted. (shrink)

I examine the impact of the presence of anarchists among key legal officials upon the legal positivist theories of H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz. For purposes of this paper, an anarchist is one who believes that the law cannot successfully obligate or create reasons for action beyond prudential reasons, such as avoiding sanction. I show that both versions of positivism require key legal officials to endorse the law in some way, and that if a legal system can continue to (...) exist and function when its key officials reject the reason-giving character of law, then we have a reason to re-examine and amend legal positivism. (shrink)

The guilt left by immoral actions is why moral duties are more pressing and serious than other reasons like prudential considerations. Religions talk of sin and karma; the secular still speak of spots or stains. I argue that a moral staining view of guilt is in fact the best model. It accounts for guilt's reflexive character and for anxious, scrupulous worries about whether one has transgressed. To understand moral staining, I borrow Christine Korsgaard's view that we construct our identities (...) as agents through our actions. The contribution of immoral actions to self-constitution explains why moral obligations have priority and importance. (shrink)

I argue, contrary to the consensus of most contemporary work in ethics, that there are no (fundamentally, distinctively) prudential reasons for action. That is to say: there is no class of reasons for action that is distinctively and fundamentally about the promotion of the agent’s own well-being. Considerations to do with the agent’s well-being can supply the agent with reasons only in virtue of her well-being mattering morally or in virtue of her caring about her own well-being. In both (...) of these cases, the way that such prudential considerations supply reasons for action is a way that the well-being of others can supply reasons for action too. (shrink)

Several authors, including Thomas Nagel and David Gauthier, have defended the view that reasons of self-interest (prudential reasons) are rationally binding. That is, there is always a reason, bearing on the rational advisability, based on one's self-interest and, as a result, a person may act irrationally by knowingly acting against such reasons regardless of the person's desires or values. Both Nagel and Gauthier argue from the rationally mandatory nature of prudential reasons to the conclusion that moral reasons can (...) be rationally mandatory, challenging the neo-Humean position that practical reasons that bear on an agent's rationality are essentially grounded on the agent's subjective, contingent, conative states. I argue, pace Nagel and Gauthier, that prudential reasons are not rationally mandatory--that the rational requirement to act in one's own interest, when it exists, is, as the neo-Humean insists, grounded on one's subjective, contingent, conative states. Prudential reasons are not reasons for every (conceivable) agent--not in the sense that bears on the rational advisability of action. (shrink)

According to Longtermism, our acts’ expected influence on the expected value of the world is mainly determined by their effects in the far future. There is, given total utilitarianism, a straightforward argument for Longtermism due to the enormous number of people that might exist in the future, but this argument does not work on person-affecting views. In this paper, we will argue that these views might also lead to Longtermism if Prudential Longtermism is true. Prudential Longtermism holds for (...) a person if and only if our acts’ overall influence on that person’s expected well-being is mainly determined by the acts’ effects in the far future. We argue that (due to a small chance of anti-ageing and uploading) there could be an enormous amount of prudential value for some contemporary person in the far future and that value may be so large that it dominates their overall expectation of lifetime well-being. (shrink)

According to the moral error theory, all moral judgments are false. Until lately, most error theorists were local error theorists; they targeted moral judgments specifically and were less skeptical of other normative areas. These error theorists now face so-called “prudential parity objections”, according to which whatever evidence there is in favor of the moral error theory is also evidence for a prudential error theory. The present paper rejects three prudential parity objections: one based on the alleged irreducible (...) normativity of prudential reasons; another on the lack of a story about the normativity of hypothetical reasons; yet another on the very nature of reasons generally. I argue that these objections leave an important variant of a local moral error theory intact. (shrink)

Moral obligation, according to one influential conception, is distinct among other moral concepts in at least two respects. First, obligation is linked with demands. If I am obligated to you to do X, then you can demand that I do X. Second, obligation is linked with blame and the rest of our accountability practices. If I am obligated to you to do X, failure to do so is blameworthy and you may hold me accountable for it. The puzzle is the (...) following: when it comes to our attitudes, in particular to our emotional responses, these two components seem to come apart. We do not appear to demand that others feel a given emotion. And yet, we do blame others (and ourselves) for feeling them. The challenge I take on in this paper is to sort out the moral status of emotions given these facts. (shrink)

Most philosophers who discuss the value of forgiveness concentrate on its moral value. This paper focuses on the prudential value of forgiveness, which has been surprisingly neglected by moral philosophers. I suggest that this may be because part of the concept of forgiveness involves the forgiver being motivated by moral rather than prudential considerations. But this does not justify neglecting the prudential value of forgiveness, which is important even though forgivers should not be prudentially motivated. Forgiveness helps (...) satisfy interests arising from the need for co-operation in such areas as epistemic life, where humans are interdependent. Forgiveness can restore epistemic relationships, and this has the prudential value of helping agents navigate their way through their environment. While the prudential value of forgiveness may be supplementary to its moral value, it would be a mistake to ignore this area of the debate. Exploring the prudential value of forgiveness enriches our understanding of the role that this practice plays in human life, and may contribute to explaining the origin of forgiveness. (shrink)

This paper argues that treating James' "The Will to Believe" as a defense of prudential reasoning about belief seriously misrepresents it. Rather than being a precursor to current defenses of prudential arguments, James paper has, if anything, more affinities to certain prominent strains in contemporary naturalized epistemology.

Existence internalism claims that facts about human psychological responsiveness constrain the metaphysics of value in particular ways. Chapter 5 examines whether some form of existence internalism holds for prudential value. It emphasizes the importance of a modal distinction that has been traditionally overlooked. Some facts about personal good are facts about realized good. For example, right now it may be true that X is good for me. Other facts about goodness are facts about what would be good for me (...) in certain possible futures. These are facts about merely possible good. Philosophers should be internalists about realized good. The chapter defends a qualified version of the idea that a necessary constraint on something’s being good for a person at a time is that the thing in question elicits some kind of positive psychological response from the person at that time. However, philosophers should be motivational externalists about merely possible good. Facts about the superior future goodness of an option may ground reasons now to choose it. But we should not expect individuals to always recognize such facts, and so there is no reason to think such facts are always motivating. (shrink)

The contention of this article is that parents do have obligations to care for their children, but for reasons that are not typically offered. I argue that this obligation to care for one’s children is unfair to parents but not unjust. I do not provide a detailed account of what our obligations are to our children. Rather, I focus on providing a justification for any obligation to care for them at all.

Is the relation ‘is a morally permissible alternative to’ transitive? The answer seems to be a straightforward yes. If Act B is a morally permissible alternative to Act A and Act C is a morally permissible alternative to B then how could C fail to be a morally permissible alternative to A? However, as both Dale Dorsey and Frances Kamm point out, there are cases where this transitivity appears problematic. My aim in this paper is to provide a solution to (...) this problem. I will then investigate Kamm’s justification for rejecting the transitivity of the ‘is a permissible alternative to’ relation. Next, I will look at Dorsey’s solution, which involves a reinterpretation of the intuitions used to generate the problem. I will argue that neither of these solutions are fully satisfying before going on to provide my own solution to the problem and arguing that it avoids these problems. (shrink)

The Problem of Obligation is the problem of how to explain the features of moral obligations that distinguish them from other normative phenomena. Two recent accounts, the Second-Personal Account and the Relational Account, propose superficially similar solutions to this problem. Both regard obligations as based on the claims or legitimate demands that persons as such have on one another. However, unlike the Second-Personal Account, the Relational Account does not regard these claims as based in persons’ authority to address (...) them. Advocates of the Relational Account accuse the Second-Personal Account of falling prey to the Problem of Antecedence. According to this objection, the Second-Personal Account is committed to the implausible claim that we have an obligation to φ only if, and because, others demand that we φ. Since the Relational Account’s proposed solution to the Problem of Obligation does not face the Problem of Antecedence, its advocates argue that it is dialectically superior to the Second-Personal Account. In this paper, I defend the Second-Personal Account by arguing that, first, the Relational Account does not actually solve the Problem of Obligation and, second, the Second-Personal Account does not fall prey to the Problem of Antecedence. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collective obligations to refer to obligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collective obligations, in this sense; that such obligations can give rise to and explain obligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective (...) obligations are not simply reducible to individual obligations; and that collective obligations supervene on individual obligations, without being reducible to them. The sort of supervenience I have in mind here is what is sometimes called ‘global supervenience’. In other words, there cannot be two worlds which differ in respect of the collective obligations which exist in them without also differing in respect of the individual obligations which exist in them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...) power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)

The current prevailing view is that participation in biomedical research is above and beyond the call of duty. While some commentators have offered reasons against this, we propose a novel public goods argument for an obligation to participate in biomedical research. Biomedical knowledge is a public good, available to any individual even if that individual does not contribute to it. Participation in research is a critical way to support an important public good. Consequently, all have a duty to participate. The (...) current social norm is that individuals participate only if they have a good reason to do so. The public goods argument implies that individuals should participate unless they have a good reason not to. Such a shift would be of great aid to the progress of biomedical research, eventually making society significantly healthier and longer lived. (shrink)

Do facts about what an agent would freely do in certain circumstances at least partly determine any of her moral obligations? Actualists answer ‘yes’, while possibilists answer ‘no’. We defend two novel hybrid accounts that are alternatives to actualism and possibilism: Dual Obligations Hybridism and Single Obligation Hybridism. By positing two moral ‘oughts’, each account retains the benefits of actualism and possibilism, yet is immune from the prima facie problems that face actualism and possibilism. We conclude by highlighting (...) one substantive difference between our two hybrid accounts. (shrink)

It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of (...) moral vocabulary to probe moral judgments and was insensitive to different levels of seriousness for the consequences of inaction (Experiment 4). Judgments about moral obligation were no different for individuals who can or cannot perform physical actions, and these judgments differed from evaluations of a non-moral obligation (Experiment 7). Together these results demonstrate that commonsense morality rejects the “ought implies can” principle for moral requirements, and that judgments about moral obligation are made independently of considerations about ability. By contrast, judgments of blame were highly sensitive to considerations about ability (Experiment 8), which suggests that commonsense morality might accept a “blame implies can” principle. (shrink)

It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood (...) in terms of moral demands on individual group members. It has also been suggested that members of groups can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This paper discusses the agency problem and argues that the most promising attempts at solutions understand group obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents. (shrink)

Very often when the vast majority of experts agree on some scientific issue, laypeople nonetheless regularly consume articles, videos, lectures, etc., the principal claims of which are inconsistent with the expert consensus. Moreover, it is standardly assumed that it is entirely appropriate, and perhaps even obligatory, for laypeople to consume such anti-consensus material. I maintain that this standard assumption gets things backwards. Each of us is particularly vulnerable to false claims when we are not experts on some topic – such (...) falsehoods have systematic negative impacts on our doxastic attitudes that we can neither prevent nor correct. So, when there is clear expert consensus on a given scientific issue, while it is permissible for experts to consume anti-consensus material, laypeople have an epistemic obligation to avoid such material. This argument has important consequences for philosophical discussions of our epistemic obligations to perform or omit belief-influencing actions. Such discussions typically abstract away from the important differences between experts and laypeople. Accordingly, we should reject this typical practice as problematic, and insist instead that laypeople and experts have fundamentally different epistemic obligations. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that non-agent collectives, including what one might call the ‘global collective’ consisting of the world’s population taken as a whole, cannot be the bearers of non-distributive moral obligations on pain of violating the principle that ‘ought implies can’. I argue that one prominent line of argument for this conclusion fails because it illicitly relies on a formulation of the ‘ought implies can’ principle which is inapt for contexts which allow for the possibility of non-distributive plural (...) predications of agency, which are precisely the contexts in which we might expect non-agents to be obligation-bearers. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to show how an appeal to a particular kind of collective obligation - a collective obligation falling on an unstructured collective consisting of the world’s population as a whole – can be used to undermine recently influential objections to the idea that there is a human right to health which have been put forward by Gopal Sreenivasan and Onora O’Neill. -/- I take this result to be significant both for its own sake and because it (...) helps to answer a challenge often put to Those who argue for the existence of collective obligations: namely, to explain why the question of whether there are any such obligations might matter from a practical point of view. One way of introducing the objection is to focus on questions of agency. Here I'll argue both that there can be obligations on groups that are not themselves collective agents, and that these can play an important explanatory and clarifcatory role in accounting for obligations which fall on individuals. (shrink)

We naturally attribute obligations to groups, and take such obligations to have consequences for the obligations of group members. The threat posed by anthropogenic climate change provides an urgent case. It seems that we, together, have an obligation to prevent climate catastrophe, and that we, as individuals, have an obligation to contribute. However, understood strictly, attributions of obligations to groups might seem illegitimate. On the one hand, the groups in question—the people alive today, say—are rarely fully-fledged (...) moral agents, making it unclear how they can be subjects of obligations. On the other, the attributions can rarely be understood distributively, as concerned with members’ obligations, because obligations to do something require a capacity to do it, and individual members often lack the relevant capacities. Moreover, even if groups can have obligations, it is unclear why that would be relevant for members, exactly because members often lack control over whether group obligations are fulfilled. In previous work, I have argued that a general understanding of individual obligations extends non-mysteriously to irreducibly shared obligations, rendering attributions of obligations to groups legitimate. In this paper, I spell out how the proposed account also helps us understand the relation between individual and shared obligations. Even though few individual human agents have any significant control over whether we will be successful in preventing climate catastrophe, our collective capacity to prevent catastrophe and shared preventative obligation to do so can give rise to significant individual obligations to contribute to its fulfillment. (shrink)

In Wilmot-Smith’s recent ‘Law, “Ought”, and “Can”,’ he argues that legal obligation does not imply ability. In this short reply, I show that Wilmot-Smith’s arguments do not withstand critical scrutiny. In section 1, I attack Wilmot-Smith’s argument for the claim that allowing for impossible obligations makes for a better legal system, and I introduce positive grounds for thinking otherwise. In section 2, I show that, even if Wilmot-Smith had established that impossible obligations make for a better legal system, (...) his subsequent attack on OIC fails. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, in addition to having an obligation to resist the oppression of others, people have an obligation to themselves to resist their own oppression. This obligation to oneself, I argue, is grounded in a Kantian duty of self-respect.

This book proposes a substantially new solution to a classic philosophical problem: how is it possible that morality genuinely obligates us, binding our wills without regard to our perceived well-being? Building on Immanuel Kant’s idea of the fact of reason, the book argues that the bindingness of obligation can be traced back to the fact, articulated in different ways by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Nancy, that we find ourselves responsive, prior to all reflection, to a pre-personal, originary dimension (...) of sense. (shrink)

The focus of the paper is a sophism based on the proposition ‘This is Socrates’ found in a short treatise on obligational casus attributed to William Heytesbury. First, the background to the puzzle in Walter Burley’s traditional account of obligations (the responsio antiqua), and the objections and revisions made by Richard Kilvington and Roger Swyneshed, are presented. All six types of obligations described by Burley are outlined, including sit verum, the type used in the sophism. Kilvington and Swyneshed (...) disliked the dynamic nature of the responsio antiqua, and Kilvington proposed a revision to the rules for irrelevant propositions. This allowed him to use a form of reasoning, the “disputational meta-argument”, which is incompatible with Burley’s rules. Heytesbury explicitly rejected Kilvington’s revision and the associated meta-argument. Swyneshed also revised Burley’s account of obligations, formulating the so-called responsio nova, characterised by the apparently surprising thesis that a conjunction can be denied both of whose conjuncts are granted. On closer inspection, however, his account is found to be less radical than first appears. (shrink)

Shared Decision Making (‘SDM’) is one of the most significant developments in Western health care practices in recent years. Whereas traditional models of care operate on the basis of the physician as the primary medical decision maker, SDM requires patients to be supported to consider options in order to achieve informed preferences by mutually sharing the best available evidence. According to its proponents, SDM is the right way to interpret the clinician-patient relationship because it fulfils the ethical imperative of respecting (...) patient autonomy. However, there is no consensus about how decisions in SDM contexts relate to the principle of respect for autonomy. In response, I demonstrate that in order to make decisions about what treatment they will or will not receive, patients will be required to meet different conditions depending on the approach proponents of SDM take to understanding personal autonomy. Due to the fact that different conceptions of autonomy yield different obligations, I argue that if physicians and patients satisfied all the conditions described in standard accounts of SDM, then SDM would undermine patient autonomy. (shrink)

Resolving to finish reading a novel, staying true to your punk style, or dedicating your life to an artistic project: these are examples of aesthetic commitments. I develop an account of the nature of such commitments, and I argue that they are significant insofar as they help us manage the temporally extended nature of our aesthetic agency and our relationships with aesthetic objects. At the same time, focusing on aesthetic commitments can give us a better grasp on the nature of (...) aesthetic normativity; this is because, in making aesthetic commitments, we are capable of giving aesthetic concerns the weight of obligation. I argue that appealing to aesthetic commitments allows us to account for the existence of aesthetic obligations as well as their grounding. I conclude by arguing that, although the aesthetic domain is a domain of play and freedom of choice, there is nevertheless an important place in it for both aesthetic commitments and the aesthetic obligations they generate. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that it is wrong for us to consume only, or overwhelmingly, media that broadly aligns with our own political viewpoints: that is, it is wrong to be politically “partisan” in our decisions about what media to consume. We are obligated to consume media that aligns with political viewpoints other than our own – to “diversify our sources”. This is so even if our own views are, as a matter of fact, substantively correct.

Are there aesthetic obligations, and what would account for their binding force if so? I first develop a general, domain‐neutral notion of obligation, then critically discuss six arguments offered for and against the existence of aesthetic obligations. The most serious challenge is that all aesthetic obligations are ultimately grounded in moral norms, and I survey the prospects for this challenge alongside three non‐moral views about the source of aesthetic obligations: individual practical identity, social practices, and aesthetic (...) value primitivism. I conclude by raising questions for further work in this area. (shrink)

This paper lists a number of puzzles for shared obligations – puzzles about the role of individual influence, individual reasons to contribute towards fulfilling the obligation, about what makes someone a member of a group sharing an obligation, and the relation between agency and obligation – and proposes to solve them based on a general analysis of obligations. On the resulting view, shared obligations do not presuppose joint agency.

In recent attempts to define ‘harm’, the most promising approach has often been thought to be the counterfactual comparative account of harm. Nevertheless, this account faces serious difficulties. Moreover, it has been argued that ‘harm’ cannot be defined without reference to a substantive theory of well-being, which is itself a fraught issue. This has led to the call for the concept to simply be dropped from the moral lexicon altogether. I reject this call, arguing that the non-comparative approach to defining (...) harm has not been sufficiently explored. I then develop such an account that avoids the difficulties faced by comparative accounts whilst not presupposing a substantive theory of well-being. I conclude that this definition renders a concept of harm that can be meaningfully employed in our moral discourse. (shrink)

I explore various ways of integrating the framework for predeterminism, agency, and ability in[P.McNamara, Nordic J. Philos. Logic 5 (2)(2000) 135] with a framework for obligations. However,the agential obligation operator explored here is defined in terms of a non-agential yet personal obligation operator and a non-deontic (and non-normal) agency operator. This is contrary to the main current trend, which assumes statements of personal obligation always take agential complements. Instead, I take the basic form to be an agent’s being obligated (...) to be such that p. I sketch some logics for agential obligation based on personal obligation and agency, first in a fairly familiar context that rules out conflicting personal obligations (and derivatively, conflicting agential obligations), and then in contexts that do allow for conflicts (of both sorts). (shrink)

Many authors hold that collectives, as well as individuals can be the subjects of obligations. Typically these authors have focussed on the obligations of highly structured groups, and of small, informal groups. One might wonder, however, whether there could also be collective obligations which fall on everyone – what I shall call ' global collective obligations '. One reason for thinking that this is not possible has to do with considerations about agency : it seems as (...) though an entity can only be the subject of obligations if it is an agent. In this paper, I try to show that the argument from agency is not a good reason for being sceptical about the existence of global collective obligations : it derives whatever plausibility it has from the idea that claims about obligation need to be addressable to some agent. My suggestion is that we should accept this principle about the addressability of obligations, but deny that the addressee of an obligation need be the subject of that obligation. The collective obligations of unstructured collections of individuals, including global collective obligations, meet the addressability requirement insofar as they require something of the individuals who make up the collective. (shrink)

Largely thanks to Mill’s influence, the suggestion that the state ought to restrict the distribution of misinformation will strike most philosophers as implausible. Two of Mill’s influential assumptions are particularly relevant here: first, that free speech debates should focus on moral considerations such as the harm that certain forms of expression might cause; second, that false information causes minimal harm due to the fact that human beings are psychologically well equipped to distinguish truth and falsehood. However, in addition to our (...) moral obligations, we also have a distinct set of epistemic obligations—and even when a false belief doesn’t harm anyone, it constitutes an epistemically bad outcome. Moreover, Mill was profoundly mistaken about human psychology: human beings are vulnerable to the influence of a wide variety of false claims via a wide variety of psychological mechanisms. Consequently, there is a purely epistemic justification for restricting the distribution of misinformation: because each of us has an individual epistemic obligation to avoid unnecessary exposure to misinformation, and because avoiding such exposure is simply too difficult when acting alone, we all have a shared epistemic obligation to establish laws or regulations restricting the widespread distribution of misinformation. (shrink)

There are plenty of classic paradoxes about conditional obligations, like the duty to be gentle if one is to murder, and about “supererogatory” deeds beyond the call of duty. But little has been said about the intersection of these topics. We develop the first general account of conditional supererogation, with the power to solve familiar puzzles as well as several that we introduce. Our account, moreover, flows from two familiar ideas: that conditionals restrict quantification and that supererogation emerges from (...) a clash between justifying and requiring reasons. (shrink)